Flip the Pharmacy

For many years, grantors, grantees, like-minded schools of pharmacy, and other supporters have focused resources to innovate in community-based pharmacy practice.

A famous example is the Asheville Project, launched in 1997 in North Carolina, which provided education and personal oversight for city employees with chronic health problems, such as asthma, diabetes, high cholesterol, and hypertension. The project demonstrated better adherence and clinical measures, increased worker productivity, and lowered overall cost of care.

Despite being hailed as the turning point for the pharmacy profession and the sustainability of community-based pharmacy, the Asheville Project, along with many other successful innovations, did not get to sufficient scale to have widespread pharmacy practice and policy outcomes favorable to the profession. Now, the Community Pharmacy Foundation (CPF) is seeking to make a lasting and meaningful change in the perceptions of clinical outcomes with pharmacist intervention on a large national scale.

“CPF is committed to supporting innovative sustainable projects illuminating community pharmacists as highly trained and trusted medication experts [who] are part of the health care team, increasing health care access to optimize patient medication experiences and health outcomes,” said Anne Marie Kondic, PharmD, executive director of
the foundation.

Enter Flip the Pharmacy (FtP), a new pharmacy-practice transformation effort focused on identifying and adopting best practices for workflows that enable enhanced delivery of community pharmacy health care services. The program is founded and funded by the CPF. An FtP team comprises a team lead and coaches who are assigned to participating pharmacies. FtP team members meet regularly with the pharmacy’s staff throughout the process, following a set of materials and aides, guided by the FtP transformation leads, Cody Clifton, PharmD, and Randy McDonough, PharmD, MS.

Each summer, prospective pharmacies apply for an October 1 start and are scored using blinded applications. Pharmacies not selected may still participate actively through self-funding or by obtaining external funding. Pharmacies may also participate passively through use of FtP materials posted online (www.flipthepharmacy.com).

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